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Exploring New Ethics for Survival: The Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle
spaceship
- GenresNonfiction
273 pages, Paperback
First published June 21, 1972
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67 people want to read
About the author
Garrett Hardin
49 books62 followersGarrett James Hardin was a leading and controversial ecologist from Dallas, Texas, who was most well known for his 1968 paper, The Tragedy of the Commons. He is also known for Hardin's First Law of Ecology, which states "You cannot do only one thing", and used the familiar phrase "Nice guys finish last" to sum up the "selfish gene" concept of life and evolution.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 19, 2020
It's a strange experience to read a book knowing the author has actively set out to conceal their true intentions and convince you to do something under false pretenses. Even stranger when the thing they're trying to convince you to do is support the forced sterilization of poor and non-white women. Without knowing that, this book would read as fairly boilerplate piece of 1970s environmentalism, the sort of thing I read plenty of in college. He goes about his argument in an elliptical, eclectic fashion, full of random, pointless ideas, overdrawn analogies, lots of tables full of arbitrary conceptual schemes, data that are more illustrative than evidential, and of course a whole world of internal vocabulary. Lots of it is intentionally goofy, full of fanciful, hyperbolic scenarios designed to show the absurdity of positions and proposals Hardin doesn't like. Most of the content is boilerplate, too. Pollution is bad! Bioaccumulation occurs! Cars are yucky and bothersome! The precautionary principle! There is no planet B! Population growth and economic growth are inextricably linked to environmental damage, a disaster is inevitable, we need to take responsibility for our choices and act now to save the planet and ourselves.
Except, what makes Hardin's argument different is that he isn't trying to get us to care. There are, for one thing, no mentions at all of how nice nature is and whether we should protect it. Quite the opposite, really. Hardin is in essence making an anthropocentric argument for decreasing the human population. Wouldn't it be nice, he suggests, if we could destroy ecosystems as much as we pleased without worrying that it would trigger an apocalyptic overloading of the biosphere? He is doing his best to frame drastic negative population growth as an indulgence, something that would let us spread our legs and fuck some shit up without having to worry about the consequences.
The disparity between Hardin's presentation and his goals, and the subtlety with which he argues the reader toward his preferred outcomes, makes me sympathetic to the "firewall" position modern leftists take on this stuff. Anything that has even a whiff of populationism about it should be treated as if it were, or could be made to serve as, an insidious entry point for eugenic genocide. Because Hardin is genuinely quite tricky here. He pares away every option aside from forced sterilization, but it's not obvious that's what he's doing. He's just open-mindedly considering all the possibilities, tracing them to their logical conclusions, and finding that there are fairly intuitive reasons they can't work. And if he's not 100% rigorous in his proofs, or misses some obvious possibilities--well, this is after all a popular book, not a scientific work. If you didn't know to be extra-skeptical, and hadn't been exposed to a deeper perspective on this stuff elsewhere, it would probably seem reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt on such things.
He never comes out and says it. The conclusion is simply framed like this: population growth *will* stop at some point, either by choice or by ecological limits. And it won't stop by choice--I know this because of evolution--but you're welcome to try. One day you'll realize, though, that we have to stop it mandatorily. And I guess in that light it's fine, no harm no foul? Turns out he was wrong, np.
All of the real motives--all the racism--is hidden in the framing device. I came in under the impression this was a proper novel; it's not. There's just a chapter at the outset and end of each part that concern life on a colony ship--a clunky literalization of "Spaceship Earth." On this ship, there are two groups of people. The "Quotians," who think they are alone on the ship, are free to breed and die, preserving the genetic adaptativeness of the species. The others, the "Argotes," are biologically immortal and sexless, meant to preserve human culture. They can spy on the Quotians. So most of the chapters here just involve Argotes watching the Quotians pass through these stages of social decay caused by overpopulation. At one point they evolve into a state the Argotes liken to wildebeest(?) in which they are physiologically incapable of being more than 15 m from another person and can only communicate by moaning. In the end the Argotes just leave all the Quotians to die, so they can return to Earth!
But at one point, the Quotians have gone through this social schism where there was a "green" ethnicity that was wise and wanted to restrict breeding and a "yellow" group that prized freedom at any cost, and the greens were outbred to death. The language Hardin uses to discuss the debate between them is very, very obviously meant to invoke debates about racism in the US. He thinks that if he makes the races green and yellow, and hides it in a hypothetical scifi scenario, we won't notice his "white genocide" shtick, will only internalize that the whole book is in fact a racial argument subconsciously, below the level of our anti-Nazi alarm bells.
There's also some pretty fun and revealing stuff about how Hardin sees ecologists and their position in society. Lots of extremely gruesome fantasies about short-sighted pro-growthers leading crowds to hang, beat, castrate, and otherwise torture him and his peers (all listed by their real names).
Incidentally, I picked this up in the first place because it was mentioned in Robert Mayhew's Malthus biography. Mayhew paraphrases the ending in a way that makes it seem reminiscent of Wall-E and Thanos' speech in Infinity War, but that turned out to be v misleading (Hardin has the Argotes return to Earth but never reveals what happened there)! Why do ppl keep lying about things that don't matter in this stupid conversation!
Except, what makes Hardin's argument different is that he isn't trying to get us to care. There are, for one thing, no mentions at all of how nice nature is and whether we should protect it. Quite the opposite, really. Hardin is in essence making an anthropocentric argument for decreasing the human population. Wouldn't it be nice, he suggests, if we could destroy ecosystems as much as we pleased without worrying that it would trigger an apocalyptic overloading of the biosphere? He is doing his best to frame drastic negative population growth as an indulgence, something that would let us spread our legs and fuck some shit up without having to worry about the consequences.
The disparity between Hardin's presentation and his goals, and the subtlety with which he argues the reader toward his preferred outcomes, makes me sympathetic to the "firewall" position modern leftists take on this stuff. Anything that has even a whiff of populationism about it should be treated as if it were, or could be made to serve as, an insidious entry point for eugenic genocide. Because Hardin is genuinely quite tricky here. He pares away every option aside from forced sterilization, but it's not obvious that's what he's doing. He's just open-mindedly considering all the possibilities, tracing them to their logical conclusions, and finding that there are fairly intuitive reasons they can't work. And if he's not 100% rigorous in his proofs, or misses some obvious possibilities--well, this is after all a popular book, not a scientific work. If you didn't know to be extra-skeptical, and hadn't been exposed to a deeper perspective on this stuff elsewhere, it would probably seem reasonable to give the benefit of the doubt on such things.
He never comes out and says it. The conclusion is simply framed like this: population growth *will* stop at some point, either by choice or by ecological limits. And it won't stop by choice--I know this because of evolution--but you're welcome to try. One day you'll realize, though, that we have to stop it mandatorily. And I guess in that light it's fine, no harm no foul? Turns out he was wrong, np.
All of the real motives--all the racism--is hidden in the framing device. I came in under the impression this was a proper novel; it's not. There's just a chapter at the outset and end of each part that concern life on a colony ship--a clunky literalization of "Spaceship Earth." On this ship, there are two groups of people. The "Quotians," who think they are alone on the ship, are free to breed and die, preserving the genetic adaptativeness of the species. The others, the "Argotes," are biologically immortal and sexless, meant to preserve human culture. They can spy on the Quotians. So most of the chapters here just involve Argotes watching the Quotians pass through these stages of social decay caused by overpopulation. At one point they evolve into a state the Argotes liken to wildebeest(?) in which they are physiologically incapable of being more than 15 m from another person and can only communicate by moaning. In the end the Argotes just leave all the Quotians to die, so they can return to Earth!
But at one point, the Quotians have gone through this social schism where there was a "green" ethnicity that was wise and wanted to restrict breeding and a "yellow" group that prized freedom at any cost, and the greens were outbred to death. The language Hardin uses to discuss the debate between them is very, very obviously meant to invoke debates about racism in the US. He thinks that if he makes the races green and yellow, and hides it in a hypothetical scifi scenario, we won't notice his "white genocide" shtick, will only internalize that the whole book is in fact a racial argument subconsciously, below the level of our anti-Nazi alarm bells.
There's also some pretty fun and revealing stuff about how Hardin sees ecologists and their position in society. Lots of extremely gruesome fantasies about short-sighted pro-growthers leading crowds to hang, beat, castrate, and otherwise torture him and his peers (all listed by their real names).
Incidentally, I picked this up in the first place because it was mentioned in Robert Mayhew's Malthus biography. Mayhew paraphrases the ending in a way that makes it seem reminiscent of Wall-E and Thanos' speech in Infinity War, but that turned out to be v misleading (Hardin has the Argotes return to Earth but never reveals what happened there)! Why do ppl keep lying about things that don't matter in this stupid conversation!
May 16, 2012
This book was written in the seventies so is quite dated in spots. The overall premise seems to be that this Earth is similar to a spaceship and the only way we can keep from destroying it is through controlling population. Since history has shown that we don't do that well as individuals, perhaps the government should become involved.
Some interesting thoughts in this book. I was surprised to see Global Warming referenced, although Global Cooling was also in there. In the end I was left thinking that we have not made much progress since the time this book was written and that is a scary thing!
Some interesting thoughts in this book. I was surprised to see Global Warming referenced, although Global Cooling was also in there. In the end I was left thinking that we have not made much progress since the time this book was written and that is a scary thing!
February 20, 2013
Alarmingly relevant to current politics though written 40 years ago. Hardin is quick to take an opposing perspective on each seemIngly Intractable problem and thereby whittles each into something addressable. The author's diverse interests are apparent by the literary and historical gems scattered throughout. A thoughtful and important read for a wasteful society.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews